+$700M IT Hardware, Software, and Cloud Solutions Provider Client Anatomy of a Sales Transformation: An In-Depth Client Case Study

Business White Paper

Sales Performance Coaching

RedCard Solutions

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Foreword Today, many companies are putting every business process under a microscope in an attempt to transform how they communicate, collaborate, innovate, and go to market. In highly competitive hardware, software, and service product markets, many companies engage customers based on a “portfolio” driven sales paradigm. Sales teams engage customers attempting to emphasize the value of their differentiated portfolio capability, but winning customer business often comes down to the procurement organization’s lowest-cost-vendor-wins decision criteria. In highly competitive markets, this drives an insidious downward race-to-the-bottom erosion of margins, and diminishes the value of a direct sales force when they believe their ability to win is solely determined by the answer to the question, “What’s our bottom line price?”

To maintain customer relevance and sustain profitable growth in highly competitive markets, many companies are discovering they need to transform their selling motion to focusing on the acceleration of their customer’s business strategy and the transformational business outcomes their customers are trying to achieve. Successfully transforming their selling motion, not only requires selling teams to “raise the dialog” they are having with their customers to create alignment, their success relies on the ability to engage customer executives who own the business strategy and outcomes. If they want to change the customer’s perception of their company’s ability to deliver differentiated value, sales teams can no longer afford to limit customer interaction to Evaluators, Implementers, and Procurement managers who solely focus on lowest cost providers of what is perceived to be commodity capability (i.e., multiple vendors offering the same capability). From business unit leaders to C-Suite executives, sales teams need to be able to engage customer executives responsible for creating, integrating, communicating, and achieving innovative transformational imperatives. Sales teams must apply a repeatable process of executive discovery and solution mapping to achieve differentiated value from – the customer’s perspective. They have to be able to not only access these executives, they have to know how to drive meaningful dialog with them. That’s a huge shift for most sales teams.

“Innovate or Perish” was the marketer’s cry of the 1960s (Journal of Marketing. Vol 31 January 1967 pp12-19). Today, few companies can escape the question, “How do we remain relevant to our customers?” The quest to answer this question is driving customers to transform faster than their competition to avoid extinction, and it’s creating unprecedented opportunity for companies who can help them. Ultimately, it all comes to rest on the selling team’s shoulders to directly uncover the customer context that creates this relevance. Transforming your selling motion to help your customers achieve aggressive business outcomes begins and ends with having the right perspective, and the only one that counts is – THE CUSTOMER’S PERSPECTIVE. Only when you understand your customer’s perspective can you align your messaging to their vision and achieve relevance in their eyes. Do you know if you’re selling teams are capturing the right customer scouting input at the right level? How confident are you in your sales team’s “blocking & tackling” ability to target and access the right customer executive, ask the right questions to drive the right dialog, and have confidence the answers accurately represent key targeted customer executive stakeholder perspectives? Developing a winning deal specific game plan is not only based on the sales team’s scouting input, it also requires objectivity to transform their scouting input into the right next-step actions. Sales Performance Coaching ensures the sales team is scouting the right information, interprets the captured scouting information objectively, and optimize the deal specific game plan to close gaps and advance the deal. The challenge for most organizations is they lack a consistent platform to coach against, and as a result, any Sales Performance Coaching is sporadic at best. In the absence of consistent Sales Performance Coaching, companies compromise collaboration, the prioritized utilization of finite resources, and the ability to identify, pursue, and win the right deals. Sales Performance Coaching drives both an individual’s and especially a team’s ability to achieve peak performance.

Since 2006, RedCard has been leading a new era of Sales Performance Coaching that integrates you into your client’s business vision. With a world-class team of sales performance coaches, we illuminate the path to growth helping clients win real deals – right now. By leveraging our innovative Web-enabled global presence, decades of cross-industry practical complex sales expertise, and our easy to implement coaching process, RedCard enables clients with the ability to more consistently close “Must Win” deals that deliver transforming business outcomes to the markets they serve. We’ve been helping clients sell smarter by unlocking the power of vision driven collaboration to elevate customer dialog. From customer vision to business outcomes, to influencing customer buying criteria and customer perception, RedCard helps clients solve complex selling challenges that drive differentiation and growth in highly competitive markets.

But don’t just take our word for it…

In the pages of our “Anatomy of a Sales Transformation: An In-Depth Client Case Study” we describe the story of how RedCard Solutions adapted our coaching methodology to our client’s opportunity management system empowering our client’s ability to transform their on-boarding process and accelerating the selling motion of 46 newly-hired quota carrying Account Executives. The Result: our client achieved their objectives of improving all facets of on-boarding newly-hired hi-potential quota carrying Account Executives, and included for the first time in the company’s history that a newly-hired Account Executive (a +20 years IT Solutions Industry sales veteran having worked at one of the leading global IT equipment manufacturers) achieved President’s Club in their first year of employment. The Account Executive finished at 122% of revenue quota ($11M) and 130% of Gross Profit quota.

How can RedCard Solutions help you?

Steve Urell Managing Director

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Welcome

Introduction In this in-depth client case study, we will provide context around our client’s situation and our engagement.

After introducing the opportunities and challenges our client faced, we describe our approach and the outcomes & benefits our client has realized at the 2nd-year mark of our ongoing engagement.

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The Client A publicly traded sub-$1B dollar Information Technology Solutions Provider in the midst of transforming how they were going to market.

Entering their engagement with RedCard, our client’s is a U.S. based VAR selling into a highly competitive North American market experiencing price erosion.

Client SituationOur client is a sub-$1B IT Solutions Provider focusing on solutions spanning data center transformation, cloud, security, and next generation technologies. Our client sells to customers ranging in size from multi-billion dollar Global Multinational and U.S. Headquartered Enterprise Accounts across all major industry sectors to U.S. based Mid-Market Accounts. Our client is an industry leading Value Added Reseller of all leading OEM IT hardware and software providers, and they compete in a highly competitive market.

When combining the traditional on-premise data storage market’s rapid price compression associated with falling Gigabit/dollar storage costs with the rise in Cloud Computing and associated XaaS OpEx cost reduction models impacting on-premise data center related CapEx revenue, you have the makings of “the perfect storm”. When we engaged our client, they were in the midst of transforming how they were going to market in order to drive higher Gross Profit and accelerated revenue production.

As a sub-$1B publicly traded IT solutions company, our client’s IT Solutions Business experienced all the pressures of accurate forecasting and meeting the expectations of both internal and external stakeholders.

Our client relationship began with introductory discovery dialog with our client’s Chief Operating Officer.

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If a newly-hired quota carrying Account Executive isn’t working on a deal forecasted as “Best Case” or “Commit” state for the current quarter, that AE isn’t getting much of their Sales Leadership’s attention.

Investing in Growth As a growing company, our client was constantly investing in hiring highly-experienced quota carrying Account Executives (AEs) with prior high-performance track records at major OEMs and competing VARs (e.g., Cisco, EDS, Dell, IBM, EMC, et al.).

Our client has demonstrable evidence indicating if they can successfully get an Account Executives through their Year-1 on-boarding with the AE closing ~$2M in Year-1 revenue production and entering Year-2 with a strong deal pipeline, this projects the AE’s subsequent Year 2 revenue numbers typically will see significant (~50%) growth (i.e., $3M Year-2 revenue production). Our client has additional demonstrable evidence indicating if they can get the AE through Year-2 again with a growing pipeline and increased close rate, they can get an AE to $5M in Year 3 revenue production.

With singular focus on achieving forecasted revenue, our client’s Sales Leadership team, consisting of Regional Vice Presidents and Regional Sales Directors, invested all of their available bandwidth on those individual contributor quota carrying AEs with deals forecasted to close in a current quarter (i.e., what our client refers to as deals forecasted with “Best Case” and “Commit” status in their forecasting system).

In other words, if an Account Executive isn’t working on a deal forecasted as “Best Case” or “Commit” state for the current quarter, that AE isn’t getting much of their Sales Leadership’s attention. This is common revenue driven behavior at any publicly traded company in a fast moving highly competitive market.

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“If RedCard can help us on a national scale, investing in this program will have huge benefit in not only sustaining but accelerating our long term growth objectives.”

Why do I need outside help? Our client’s COO dove right into our discovery dialog asking, “RedCard is a Sales Performance Coaching firm. Traditional thinking is this is a Regional Sales Director’s job (i.e., first line sales management) – why do I need outside help?”

Our response was, “Your right – coaching quota carrying Account Executives (AEs) does fall on the shoulders of their direct sales management. There are actually two issues at play that impact most companies engaged in highly competitive markets. Given most companies are focused on trying to hit a quarterly revenue forecast, at best, the AEs that receive any coaching from their direct sales management are the ones in lead position to help hit the quarterly number, while the AEs that need coaching the most are the ones that receive it the least. When you combine this with the fact that most first line sales managers have never been trained on a coaching platform, let alone how to be good coaches to the quota carrying AEs they manage, this typically creates an inconspicuous downward performance trend with AEs that would benefit from coaching but who aren’t capturing mindshare with their direct sales management. Lacking robust active opportunity pipelines, newly-hired AEs would typically be most affected.”

The COO recognized the problems associated with not helping the right AEs, and the cost associated with failing to identify and hanging on to hiring mistakes too long. He commented, “In highly competitive markets like ours where all deals are competitive, this happens at every company whether they want to admit it or not. If RedCard can help us on a national scale, investing in this program will have huge benefit in not only sustaining but accelerating our long-term growth objectives.”

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Costly Newly-Hired Highly-Experienced AE Churn

Client Challenge Over the previous 6-12 months prior to engaging RedCard, our client discovered their intense focus to consistently deliver forecasted revenue was impacting their costly investment in hiring, on-boarding, and successfully developing new highly-experienced Account Executives into consistent revenue producers.

Responsible for employee development, the EVP of Human Resources began to notice a high degree of newly-hired AE churn in the AE’s first year falling into two main exit categories:

• Losing newly-hired AEs who were showing indications they were coming up to speed and performing (“Flight Risk”)

• Hanging on too long to newly-hired AEs who were failing to demonstrate potential (costly loss of non-recoverable guaranteed compensation draw and utilization of technical resources).

What was common in both categories was newly-hired AEs were not benefiting from the mentoring and collaboration Sales Leadership would typically provide newly-hired AEs to help them establish and accelerate them down a path to success.

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Newly-hired Account Executives on their own to “sink or swim”.

Client Challenge• AE “Flight Risk” - Losing newly-hired AEs demonstrating hi-potential

The worst thing for any sales organization is to invest in hiring, training, and developing a quota carrying Account Executive to an expected level of proficiency and productivity only to have them get poached by a competitor. With newly-hired AEs being given a compensation draw, associated cost-per-hire ramps dramatically if a promising AE leaves before they’ve hit their revenue production potential.

Our client discovered they were losing newly-hired hi-potential AEs who had started demonstrating an ability to develop their opportunity pipelines and close deals at the intended scope and rate, approximately 4-8 months after on-boarding.

With Sales Leadership solely supporting AEs working on transformational deals forecasted to close in the current quarter, newly-hired AEs largely worked in isolation from their Sales Leadership, and lacked corresponding mentoring and collaboration support in their efforts invested in developing revenue producing deal pipelines.

When conducting exit interviews with newly-hired AEs who were demonstrating performance potential, the EVP of Human Resources discovered these newly-hired AEs had begun to demonstrate their potential to successfully develop territory and close initial deals, but they all had the same issue: they felt unsupported and on their own to “sink or swim”. These newly-hired hi-potential AEs either proactively resigned or were poached by our client’s competitors.

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Help newly-hired AEs develop territory specific sales strategies and tactics designed to accelerate identification, qualification, and closure of pipeline opportunities

Engagement ApproachAs an IT VAR, our client is predominantly focused in the highly competitive storage and back-up markets. With the increasing commoditization of the data center hardware market, and disruptive IT competition models contributing to hardware commoditization, particularly within the storage and networking markets, OEM storage vendors are feeling tremendous amount of revenue and margin pressure. With the traditional VAR play being one that focused on predominantly hardware opportunities, our client was feeling the same revenue and margin pressures.

RedCard’s coaching focus

RedCard’s engagement approach centered on establishing a regular weekly cadence of individual sales performance coaching sessions with newly-hired Account Executives. Our sales performance coaching focused on helping newly-hired AEs develop territory specific sales strategies and tactics designed to accelerate identification, qualification, and closure of pipeline opportunities.

Reinforcing the client’s transition to new messaging

As storage became commoditized, to drive Gross Profit, our client was also investing in making the transition to being a much more consulting and services led organization. To support our client’s transition objectives, our coaching not only reinforced that newly-hired Account Executives were expected to prospect and develop consulting and services led opportunities (versus predominantly hardware opportunities), it reinforced the need for newly-hired AEs to learn and become competent in taking a new consulting and services solutions driven message to market. As with most organizations, when it comes to messaging, just because an executive or the marketing team says, “This is the right messaging.” we know unless you coach an AE against that messaging, help the AE really internalize and own the messaging, and learn how to adapt the messaging so it resonates at any given level in any given account, the messaging is less likely to take hold.

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Accelerate each newly-hired Account Executive’s success through our weekly coaching cadence

Weekly Coaching Sessions

Components of weekly coaching sessions included:

• Developing and incrementally refining a territory sales strategy comprised of: - a prioritized territory account targeting plan - a prioritized vendor relationship development plan that supported account penetration and development.

• Accelerate developing proficiency in messaging delivery associated with our client’s company story, positioning their unique differentiated value proposition, and solution offerings.

• Improving outreach messaging, structure, and tactics to accelerate success in obtaining net new logo client meetings.

• Showing AEs how to turn industry white papers into executive level discovery dialog driving sales and prospecting tools.

• Conducting role plays with an invited industry CIO to give AEs ability to practice messaging and discovery Q&A with a real customer executive in a “safe” environment.

• Improving AE ability to not only identify executive prospecting targets within their territories but also improving their targeted prospecting communications, efficiency, and effectiveness (e.g., building email templates, cold-call role playing, etc.).

• Assessing and increasing proficiency in conducting deeper consultative opportunity discovery to accelerate opportunity qualification and establishing foundation for a competitively differentiated solution.

• Assessing and increasing proficiency in identifying and accessing opportunity specific customer approver and decision makers, decision processes, and weight of decision criteria in support of opportunity qualification.

• Accelerate the newly-hired AE’s deal specific selling motion by identifying gaps in Problem, Evidence, Impact, Solutions related discovery to help them build and articulate customer connected value propositions.

• Developing game plans to accelerate opportunity closure or qualify opportunities out of pipeline.

• Strategizing with AEs on how to get customer executives back into dialog when they seem to have “gone dark”.

• Ensuring growth of a defensible pipeline at minimum of 3X annual quota.

• Ensuring a sustainable and repeatable best practice based AE selling motion.

• Continuously assess a newly-hired AE’s willingness, tenacity, skills and abilities supported sustainable success.

Engagement Kick-off Securing Executive buy-in at all levels of engagement

All change management hinges on stakeholders at every level being bought into the state you’re trying to transition to. It all started with RedCard successfully securing stakeholder buy-in from our client. In partnership with our client’s COO and his executive team, it was straight forward to incrementally secure buy-in with the top Vice Presidents running each of the sales regions across the U.S., and then in partnership with the Region Vice Presidents, we secured buy-in with each of their Regional Sales Directors (RSDs - the front-line sales managers directly managing the quota carrying Account Executives).

Executive sponsorship was huge part of what set our ability to drive a successful partnership with our client. We also made it very clear to our client we had to be 100% in sync with the RSDs.

Executive sponsorship: a huge factor in driving a successful partnership

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Ensuring a regular consistent open collaborative communication cadence

Engagement CornerstonesCollaboration & Communication

The cornerstones of the engagement consisted first and foremost of the great collaboration and communication between our RedCard coaching team and our client’s Regional Sales Directors. Our objective was to ensure RSDs realized we were an extension of their bandwidth in both how we were supporting and developing their newly-hired Account Executives, and in ensuring next-step action plans reinforced our partnership with the RSD.

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Our client’s Regional Sales Directors nominated and enrolled 32 Account Executives in the RedCard Coaching Program

Newly-Hired AE NominationOnce the Regional Sales Directors understood what we would be focusing on with their newly-hired Account Executives and how we would be tracking and reporting their progress, the engagement then moved to RSDs nominating the newly-hired AEs they wanted enrolled in the program.

After briefing our client’s extended Executive Team on the goal of the engagement and obtaining Executive Stakeholder buy-in, we tasked our client’s RSDs across the United States with identifying and nominating newly-hired AEs who they felt would be appropriate to put into the Sales Performance Coaching program.

We asked our client’s RSDs to identify a set number of AEs by simply focusing on which AEs fell into any of the following three categories:

• “If we just gave the AE some additional help, I think they could take off and be wildly successful.”

• “I’m not sure if this AE is working hard, so I want them in the program to get another set of eyes and ears on them.”

• Any newly-hired AE they wanted to immediately get into the RedCard Coaching Program to give the RSD a level of comfort knowing newly-hired AE was getting coaching every week, enabling the RSD to focus on trying to make their number for a given quarter.

Based on the newly-hired Account Executive numbers our client had shared with us, we anticipated our client would nominate approximately 20 AEs at the beginning of the program. Through the nomination process, we kicked off the engagement with the RSDs nominating and enrolling 32 AEs in the RedCard Coaching Program.

Is the AE willing to be coached?

You can’t force someone to be open to coaching. To set proper expectations with everyone involved, we were very clear with the RSDs, “Before you nominate someone, be certain they are at least open to being coached. We all know there can be individuals who are just not willing to be coached. If an AE isn’t open and willing to be coached, they aren’t a good fit for the program, and it’s not a good use of the time and money you’re investing in the coaching program.”

Very early into initial AE coaching sessions, we recognized right away there were 7 AEs out of the original 32 AEs the RSDs had nominated and enrolled into the coaching program that either didn’t want to be coached or didn’t feel they needed to be coached. We exposed this to and gained agreement with their respective RSDs to exit them from the coaching program after the first 30 day period.

Account Executives are driving new customer dialog based on our client’s new messaging.

Facilitating a TransformationPrior to our engagement, and similar to many companies, newly-hired Account Executives were in a classic “sink or swim” on-boarding reality. Through our engagement, we enabled the client to transform the newly-hired AE on-boarding experience from “sink or swim” to, “We’re going to give you support you in a way that will give you an opportunity to swim faster, but it’s all dependent on how willing and able you are achieve that outcome.”

AE willingness to transform customer engagement

Our engagement helped newly-hired AEs accelerate development of their combined territory, account, and vendor plans. We helped them develop their messaging to implement their plans, and held them accountable to implement their plans.

We helped AEs drive new customer dialog based on our client’s new consulting and services solutions driven messaging. AEs transitioned from a reactive box-portfolio selling model where the customer drives dialog with the AE based on a tactical need to buy more capacity or capability (e.g., AEs walking into customer meetings with their Storage OEM Vendor rep saying “Hey, do you just need more storage capacity, or do you need a tech refresh.”) to a strategic proactive consultative selling model (e.g., “Let’s go call on that customer proactively. Let’s talk to them about their strategies, their initiatives, and their transformation objectives; explore what they might be looking to do from a converged technology, hybrid cloud, or data center optimization standpoint. Based on that, we can bring our portfolio of subject matter expertise to bear to create a differentiated high-value solution that will enable our customer to achieve transformational business outcomes.”).

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Sales Performance Coaching only works if you’re coaching against a platform.

Coaching Against a PlatformPrior to our engagement, our client had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in training their entire sales organization, solution architects organization, and management team on an opportunity management platform.

We reinforced the foundation of our engagement by emphasizing a key concept: sales performance coaching only works if you’re coaching against a platform.

Throughout our entire engagement, we reinforced our client’s opportunity management platform training by consistently applying it to an Account Executive’s territory and opportunities to ensure it became part of their everyday selling motion. We leveraged the opportunity management platform to coach AEs on pre-call planning and deal specific game planning centering on more deliberate focused discovery and opportunity qualification. We ensured they were investing in developing a repeatable selling motion that involved proactive call planning and game planning leveraging the opportunity management platform the client had invested in - before - an AE would actually go out on a sales call.

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Getting AEs on their RSD’s RadarTo support the unique needs of each newly-hired Account Executive, RedCard coaches adjusted and adapted their coaching approach to accelerate each AE’s on-boarding experience based on the RedCard coach’s ongoing assessment of an AE’s progress. By customizing their coaching approach to each AE, RedCard coaches helped improve each AE’s skills and abilities to drive pipeline, while ensuring they knew how to consistently identify, qualify, and close opportunities.

Keeping the RSDs informed on AE pipeline and deal development

We enabled RSD’s to develop visibility and confidence in their AE’s development of defensible qualified pipeline and the progress of the specific deals the AE was working. As a result, hi-potential AEs started to get on their respective RSD’s radar screen much sooner in the AE on-boarding experience with actual deals forecasted to close in a given quarter.

Today, not only are the newly-hired hi-potential AEs engaged, getting managed, and coached by their RSDs, they are getting consistent sales performance coaching from the RedCard team. With RedCard coaches working in close partnership with RSDs, hi-potential AEs are now on a solid path to exit their initial on-boarding Year-1 having successfully built robust pipeline, territory and vendor strategies, and are driving multiple opportunities that can yield significant revenue and Gross Profit in Year-2.

Accelerating the RSD’s visibility and confidence in their AE’s progress in developing defensible qualified pipeline

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Driving +$125M in incremental pipeline and closure of +$42M in revenue.

Value, Benefits & Outcomes

The Starting Point: The Expectation of Success

The expectation of success, by the end of Year-1, was for RedCard to have identified and helped accelerate the success of those Account Executives willing and able to demonstrate they were on a path to success. RedCard was to ensure those same AEs entered their second year of employment having demonstrated their ability to close $2M in revenue against a desire selling motion while driving +$4M robust pipeline development projecting solid revenue and Gross Profit opportunity growth in Year-2. The pace of a newly-hired AE’s success would project the client could expect to benefit from an acceleration of the AE’s success not only in year one, but in Year-2, Year-3, and beyond.

New State: Success Achieved

Because of our client’s COO’s vision, their $700M Business Unit is in a position to say, “Because of our partnership with RedCard and their work with new-hire AEs, in the first year of the Sales Performance AE Coaching Program, we’ve validated through our internal financial systems RedCard drove over $125M in incremental pipeline and closure of over $42M in revenue.” Entering the second year of our engagement, our client currently has 22 AEs enrolled in the program.

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First time in the company’s history that a “new hire” wins President’s Club

President’s Club Trip WinnerIn his “Rookie Year”, one of the newly-hired Account Executives (+20 years IT Solutions Industry sales veteran having worked at one of the leading global IT equipment manufacturers) finished his first year winning President’s Club as one of the top performing AEs in the entire company.

This was the first time in the company’s history that an AE won President’s Club in their first year. The AE finished at 122% of revenue quota ($11M) and 130% of Gross Profit quota ($1.6M).

After finishing his “Rookie Year” at our client, the AE communicated to his RedCard coach:

“Believe it or not, but my results earned a spot at President’s Club! Entering the year, I would have never thought that was a possibility. I felt compelled to share and once again convey my appreciation for your time and commitment to helping me improve my sales game.”

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Regional Sales Directors are now better empowered today to embrace their role as coaches

Growing the Engagement

Continuing to Enroll New Account Executives

Seeing the success of the program, the client continued to nominate and enroll newly-hired Account Executives beyond the initial 32 AEs that started in the program. In the first 12-months of our engagement, we coached 46 AEs.

Graduating hi-potential new-hire Account Executives

The premise of the program was to accelerate newly-hired AE success through their first year of employment, and then graduate them from the program based on the AE being set up for accelerated success as they moved into their second year of employment. The goals were to ensure an AE exited their first year with a full pipeline, the AE was actively working identified revenue opportunities, and the AE had defined performance against revenue and Gross Profit plans that met or exceeded their Regional Sales Director’s expectations. As a result of accelerating their success faster than anticipated, we successfully graduated 14 of the 46 AEs out of the program prior to those AEs hitting their 1-year mark in the program.

Transferring the coaching back to the Regional Sales Directors

Successfully graduating a newly-hired AE from the coaching program meant we needed to be able to transfer our coaching paradigm to the RSD managing newly-hired AE. At the point of AE graduation, we transferred the coaching 100% back to the RSD by conducting a hand-off coaching sessions where the RSD could observe how we coached their AE. RSDs are now better empowered today to embrace their role as coaches than they were a year ago because of our bi-weekly interaction.

Successfully graduated newly-hired AEs continue to drive robust pipeline, revenue and Gross Profit achievement because they embraced continued sales performance coaching and weaved into their daily, weekly, and monthly selling motion.

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Regional Sales Directors started asking RedCard coaches, “What should I be doing every day to reinforce what you’re doing to accelerate my newly-hired AE’s success?”

Growing the Engagement

Maximizing Opportunity Management Platform ROI

As a direct result of our weekly reinforcement with newly-hired AEs, our client found the AEs were not only embracing the opportunity management platform (in which the company had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars) making it a regular part of their selling motion, the newly-hired AEs did so more consistently than other more tenured AEs throughout the rest of the company.

Enabling continued success between RSDs and newly-hired AEs

We knew we had to build strong partnerships between each RSD and their respective AE’s RedCard coach. We quickly began seeing evidence of how the RSDs valued our partnership when the RSDs started asking RedCard coaches, “What should I be doing every day to reinforce what you’re doing to accelerate my newly-hired AE’s success?”

Improving all facets of on-boarding success

The current coaching program participants are getting a deeper indoctrination and are much better aligned with our client’s company strategy and messaging, and how to take it to the marketplace than they were before they joined our program. We’ve seen accelerated assimilation and adoption of the tools, the messaging, and all available messaging collateral related training materials; and we reinforce this across the board every week with the newly-hired Account Executives we coach. We’re driving better adoption of the client’s whole new selling mantra by coaching a new breed of newly-hired AEs to transition from a reactive box-portfolio selling model to a strategic proactive consultative selling model that’s driving higher Gross Profit through a selling motion focused on helping their customers achieve high-value transformational business outcomes.

The newly-hired AEs currently in our program continue to see the acceleration of their performance, and our client knows as new AEs join their company, we can put them on that same launch pad.

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Driving a new selling motion focused on helping customers achieve high-value transformational business outcomes.

Attracting and retaining hi-potential new-hire AEs

Cataloging the Benefits & OutcomesReducing competitor AE poaching

Our client not only benefits from the ROI associated with a massive increase in AE productivity after successfully on-boarded and developed the AE, the client has also dramatically reduced the threat of “flight risk” by making it much harder for a competing VAR to poach our client’s AEs. As an AE’s compensation increases with increased productivity, the AE’s job satisfaction increases. As the AE continues to grow their pipeline and sell more solutions, it becomes increasing more difficult for a competing VAR to poach our client’s successful AEs given our client’s performance based compensation plans that pay extremely well.

Recruiting tool to continue to attract hi-potential new-hire AEs

Our newly-hired AE on-boarding Sales Performance Coaching program also translated into a recruiting tool our client could use in attracting and recruiting new hi-potential AEs to the company. Our client was able to use the Sales Performance Coaching program as a key differentiator as to why a prospective AE would want to come to work for our client versus other competing VARs (e.g., “We’re investing in accelerating your success.”).

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Want to learn more about how we help our clients achieve peak performance by Selling Smarter – from Vision to Win? Contact Us: info@redcard-solutions.com 714.660.9203

About RedCard Solutions

Since 2006, we’ve been helping clients sell smarter by unlocking the power of vision driven collaboration to elevate customer dialog. From customer vision to business outcomes, to influencing customer buying criteria and customer perception, RedCard helps clients solve complex selling challenges that drive differentiation and growth in highly competitive markets.

Learn more at redcard-solutions.com

© Copyright 2017 RedCard Solutions LLC. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for RedCard Solutions products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. RedCard Solutions shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

All trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

5RB30-0530RCS, Oct 2017, Rev. 1

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